A Twitter Literature Review
TWEET FOR MORE THAN JUST GOSSIP
Twitter is a widely recognized “microblogging” social networking site developed by Jack Dorsey and founded by him, Evan Williams and Biz Stone in 2006 through the startup company Obvious (Grossman, 2009). Use and interface is very simple with people answering the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. The site is arranged in such a way that the person can see what his/her friends (i.e. people followed by the person, termed as “following/s”) are also posting. Twitter also popularized the word and use of “hash tag”, which uses the number sign (#) followed by the topic you are discussing. This allows other people to join in the discussion and make the topic “trend” or become the talk of the moment. Bob Caswell identified twitter relationships “as follows: (1) I can follow you, and you can follow me; (2) I can follow you and you don’t follow me; and (3) You can follow me, and I don’t follow you.” (2008)
In late 2007, when twitter was barely reaching millions of followers, it was first extensively used by a local newspaper, The Oregonian in Portland, to convey up-to-date happenings on local events and natural disasters such as flood and road blocks. Seeing the advantage, other newspaper followed suit after. Its eventual spread, however, allowed Twitter to be more of a personal account rather than a public relation outlet. Though momentarily shifted, the idea of bringing updates never got shelved by the print media such that its increased popularity attracted more diverse groups of people with different objectives aside from blogging.
Twitter’s popularity also drew in research regarding possible uses of the site. The most prominent of which is the use of Twitter for marketing purposes wherein they assess follower reaction to promotions launched via the site. But money-making is not always the goal of these studies. Effect of government and even mass media campaigns aimed at raising awareness have also been studied. An older yet ripe study is the use of Twitter in the academe.
In this light, we can see that Twitter is not just for everyday chatter andhumors. It has other potentials that can either be useful to or be exploited by different groups of people. This very moment, twitter is being used by a variety of landscapes and industries, extending the media to their audiences, the seller to their customers, and even the influential to their supporters. This effect begs the question, “Just how prominent and promising is it TRULY?”
The Twitter World
While Facebook easily thumps Twitter in the number of users (66% of online American adults use Facebook versus 16% Twitter), the latter proved to be a growing force to be reckoned with.It is used by different kinds of people from African-Americans, young adults to urban and suburban students and has increased in users from 8% of internet users in November 2010 to 15% in February 2012. Everyday use has also increased from 2% of the 8% who uses it on a typical day in 2011 to more than half of the 15% (8%) in 2012. (“Twitter Use in 2012”)
Just like any other social networking site, Twitter is and can be used literally by everyone, provided that they know how to utilize it. Some Facebook users even applied Twitter exercises such as hash-tag and @-tag use when the latter’s popularity was gaining, a clear evidence of how Twitter has influenced people’s online behavior.However, unlike other social networking sites, Twitter is “very personal, mobile, and quick” (Grossman, 2009).
Broadcast
The speed with which news seemed to travel via Twitter has initiallyattracted the one industry that benefits from timely scoops and by-the-second reports – the media. The Oregonian may be the first newspaper who ever utilized Twitter for information dissemination, but Twitter proved to The Oregonianand everyone else that it is not just made for the print media. Other media platforms such as television, radio, music, and film started using it as well in the hopes of reaching out to more supporters while providing news.
One instance cited by Mr. Paul Farhi in his review, “The Twitter Explosion” was the building that collapsed near Lower Manhattan sometime in late April 2009. The New York Times relied mostly on the site to get eyes and ears on the incident. An incident very similar to another newsworthy event in the 2009 Iran elections, when after a surprising results, the opponent’s supporters took to the streets to uprise. It became the US government’s source of news regarding protests happening in Iran during their presidential elections amidst Iran government freezing all media coverage on the then-volatile land (Grossman, 2009).
Even the use of hashtags was successfully mastered by organizations hoping to give a certain concern or topic across. Hashtags were prominently used and re-used so that all conversations regarding that one news topic can be available to whoever needs it, whether it be print or broadcast media or its audiences. According to Mr. Craig Scholtz “Twitter ‘works best in situations where the story is changing so fast that the mainstream media can't assemble all the facts at once’”. (Farhi, 2009) Here, the media is allowing the people to weave bits and pieces of the story in order to be abreast with a certain current event.
Advertise
There is, on the other hand, another type of media that is benefitting from the use of tweets. Because the general scheme of how Twitter works is through the exchange of ideas, people do have the relative freedom of posting opinions and thoughts about any topic on the site, a platform used to the advantage of advertising media. Pak and Paroubek in 2010 recognized the potential of Twitter for “sentiment analysis and opinion mining” or the research of people’s personal, political and religious views for marketing and advertising purposes.
Most ad campaigns utilize popularity in the form of celebrities and other social figures to make a statement. In the twitter world where only words are transmitted across, the term “influentials” come into play. In this world, celebrities may be popular (i.e. have many followers) and not necessarily be influential, while others may not be so popular and yet elicit a horde of retweets and mentions. (Cha, Haddadi, Benevenuto, and Gummadi, 2010) There are a few challenges to using this tool, however. For one thing, companies are faced with the task of making an influential interested with what they offer. Secondly, with any media, it is important to note that saturation is crucial in advertising. People can easily lose interest if an influential’s page is swarmed with ads and product citing, which can lead to their fall over time.
Associate
While the other two proved to be good for business, Twitter further expanded its portfolio catering to the academic and public service world. Dunlap and Lowenthal (2009) analyzed the use of Twitter as tool for learning-mediated systems (LMS) especially for online and out-of-the-classroom classes. It was found that, with considerable cooperation from faculties and students, twitter proved to be effective in the learning environment at least to correct mistaken concepts. This strengthens claims on Twitter bringing people closer.
Cautious
However, data from twitter can be a bit overwhelming as identified by Pak and Paroubek (2010). Communication may be varied depending on the society. Statements are very open to subjectivity and thus can be easily misunderstood by other readers. Information can also be easily fabricated being that twitter provides only an IP address and not a tangible human being. With any other social networking site, people are warned to be vigilant and cautious on which data to consume and which to ignore.
Without a doubt, Twitter has revolutionized the way the world communicates. In under a decade, a new generation of more-informed consumers, semi-reporters, and microbloggers has emerged to offer us a new way of getting information. Studies show that, different industries like media, business and academe have also benefitted from the development. The media was abreast in using Twitter to give real time news and information. Advertisement, which is a central part of the consumer world, has also been practiced via the site. Twitter has even become a possible tool for learning. Whatever the goal may be, one cause has emerged for its use – to be able to reach to a target populace (i.e. audience, costumers, and students).
Twitter’s full potential is yet to be unfolded. An enlightening and game-changing topic raised by Fahri (2009) was Twitter’s staying power in a continuously changing environment. Future studies can also dwell on how Twitter: (1) makes users keep using them and, (2) benefits from the big industries (while they benefit from the site) who clearly are making huge profit out of the site. The use of Twitter in marketing also showed great potential for future research such that database for the influence of ad campaigns across countries and languages can be further developed (Pak & Paroubek, 2010). While the academe is encouraging further study on the use of Twitter in classrooms, aside from online, and know its effect on social presence (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009).
REFERENCES
Caswell, B. (Feb 12 2008). Twitter Review: Waste of Time or Extremely Valuable?.Retrieved from http://www.techconsumer.com/2008/02/12/twitter-review-waste-of-time-or-extremely-valuable/
Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., Gummadi, K.P. (2010).Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy.In Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, p. 10-12.
Dunlap, J. C. &Lowenthal, P. R. (2009).Tweeting the night away: Using Twitter to enhance social presence. Journal of Information Systems Education, 20(2)
Fahri, P. (2009). The Twitter Explosion.American Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4756
Grossman, L. (2009, June 17). Iran’s Protests: Why Twitter is the Medium of the Movement. Time.Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html.
Pak, A. &Paroubek P. (2010).Twitter as a Corpus for Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining.In Proceedings of LREC.International Conference on Language Resource and Evaluation, p. 1320-1326.
Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.(2012). Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online [Data file]. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Online-Pictures.aspx
Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.(2012). Twitter Use 2012 [Data file]. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Twitter-Use-2012.aspx
